University Star's Sloppy Attack on President Bush

The august newspaper of record at my school, Texas State University, is well-known on campus for a liberal bias, sloppy writing, and a galling lack of research. One of the University Star's left-leaning writers wrote this screed in today's edition.

Here's my response:

To the editor:

Tuesday’s column by Stephanie Silvas (“Death toll, statistical facts denied by Bush administration”) displayed a worrying lack of journalistic research as well as an irrelevant attack on President Bush. Without much investigation into the Johns Hopkins study she cites, Silvas pulls her figures and arguments out of thin air.

As to her assertion that President Bush estimates only 30,000 Iraqis have been killed, Silvas seems to be referring to a speech he gave in December 2005, almost a year ago. This estimate was in line with the numbers published at that time by the website IraqBodyCount.net, hardly a mouthpiece of the Bush administration. Since that December 2005 speech, the President has not made any public references to estimated civilian casualties. As of Tuesday October 17, 2006 Iraq Body Count estimates between 43,937 and 48,783 deaths since the beginning of the war. According to their website, “the count includes civilian deaths caused by coalition military action and by military or paramilitary responses to the coalition presence (e.g. insurgent and terrorist attacks). It also includes excess civilian deaths caused by criminal action resulting from the breakdown in law and order which followed the coalition invasion.”

Silvas quotes the Hopkins study as saying “eighty-four percent of the violent deaths were reported to be cause by the actions of Coalition forces and 95 percent of those deaths were due to air strikes or artillery.” This quote is not taken from the October 2006 Hopkins study and in fact comes from an October 2004 press release on the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health website. The 2006 study estimates the “deaths attributable to the coalition accounted for 31% of post-invasion violent deaths.”

Furthermore, the authors of the study try to put the Iraq conflict in perspective, comparing it to the Vietnam War (3 million civilian deaths), civil war in the Congo (3.8 million civilian deaths), and the crisis in Darfur (200,000 deaths).

Serious observers can have legitimate differences in their estimates of war casualties. (The Iraqi Ministry of Health offers an estimate of at least 50,000.) This is a war and in war civilians will die, no matter how unpleasant that fact may be. The United States removed a brutal dictator whose atrocities were overlooked by the world for 35 years and were perpetuated by a religious minority on a violently repressed religious majority. Freed of their oppressors, that majority is now exacting revenge for 35 years of rape, torture, mass murder, and ethnic cleansing. There is little the US military or President Bush can do to stop that however Silvas seems eager to believe the President is either ignorant or unaware of that human cost. Whether 650,000 or 50,000, Iraqis will continue to die until Iraqis decide to embrace decent governance.

At best, this is sloppy journalism on the part of Silvas and sloppy editorial standards on the part of the University Star. At worst, Silvas is attempting to portray the President and US military as bloodthirsty and having a callous disregard for human life. Mark Twain is often attributed as saying “there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.” Silvas is content to cite statistics, without any effort at balance or research in her attacks. Silvas and the University Star should be embarrassed this column made it to print.


Sincerely,

Coleman Kneisley
International Relations Senior